Polonia: Make Allies. Linda C. Wisniewski's Guest Blog Post

Author Linda C.Wisniewski tells Polonia we must make allies

Allies: Rev. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Heschel was one of many supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. 

In the PFLAG "Stay Close" ad campaign, heterosexuals embrace and support their homosexual family members. 

Israel has many friends and allies who are not Jewish. 

Keep Talking

By Linda C.Wisniewski

I hate to be defensive. If only Polish people are standing up and saying we were not anti-Semites, it carries less weight than if we had non-Polish allies speaking up for us. The civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the women's movement, all had powerful allies that were not part of the group unfairly treated.

I learned very young that people would look down on me for being Polish. I learned it from my mother. I went to a Polish elementary school and all of my friends were Polish too. In the neighborhood, nobody called me a Polack. I learned that I should expect that, but actually it never happened. I just grew up expecting it. I was lucky.

In school, I learned about the Holocaust. When I asked my mother why nobody stopped it, she said "we didn't know."

My first husband was Jewish. Our wedding caused earthquakes in both our families. My husband smarted still from being called anti-Jewish names when he was little. His relatives giggled and called me a derogatory name for Gentile woman. An older woman at my workplace warned me that "Jews and Polish people don't get along." She was Polish and Catholic.

The marriage ended after ten years, not because of religion (neither of us was observant by then) but because we looked at life in different ways. I read about the concentration camps in occupied Poland and in Germany, and learned that some of my people collaborated or participated in genocide, like some Germans and Ukrainians and French and Italians. I felt sad but not defensive, because I believe we need to acknowledge the good and bad in all of us. There were bad Americans at My Lai and Abu Ghraib and bad Poles at Jedwabne.

In 2010, I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau with my second husband, Polish American like me. We were guided by Polish citizens who were very respectful of the sites. They said they could not do it every day, the story is so sad. I will never understand the cruelty of genocide, but I do understand how "we didn't know" became an excuse for inaction. Ursula Hegi's novel, Stones From the River, made it clear for me, for the first time. Ordinary people hoped the Nazis would go away, or that the crimes would not touch them or their friends or family. The movement grew and grew aided by prejudice and fear until it became so powerful it took huge armies to halt the horror.

In Krakow, we visited the Kazimierz district and learned about a Jewish revival in Poland. I felt a dual patriotism when a Polish college professor said "we have the pain of a phantom limb here" as he talked about the loss of so many of Poland's Jews. I thought of the loss of so many Native Americans in the early days of my birth country. Same kinds of losses, same delayed acknowledgement.

In my youth, I laughed nervously at Polish jokes. I even told a few myself, to show I had a good sense of humor and could laugh at myself. One day I stopped, not in a big moment of epiphany, but because I felt false, phony, and inauthentic for mocking my ancestry. I didn't really believe Poles were brutes, stupid or drunks. When I told a friend her Polish jokes offended me, she was angry. She called me judgmental and said many people laughed at Polish, Italian and Irish jokes. It's all in fun, she said. Then count me out, I replied. I didn't give a detailed explanation or try to defend my position. I just resolved then and there to speak up, walk away, and not allow ethnic jokes or their ugly cousin, hate speech, in my presence.

For the rest of the world to understand that Poland did not build concentration camps for Jews, and that Polish people welcomed Jews for many years before Hitler came to power, and that Poles are not brutes, we will need allies from other ethnic backgrounds. Otherwise, I think our protests will be dismissed as whining and defensive.

But to gain these allies, we need to keep talking and writing about this in a factual, clear and not embittered way. We need to frame it as part of the larger struggle for social justice and equality. Then I think we will succeed in seeing all people as individuals, some more flawed than others, but no one as an unjust stereotype.

Linda C.Wisniewski is a writer and memoir teacher. Her book, Off Kilter: A Woman's Journey to Peace With Scoliosis, Her Mother and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her website and blog at http://www.lindawis.com.

***

Linda C Wisniewski is correct. "Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype" is very much not a chauvinist book. It very much is a book that, as Wisniewski says, frames the struggle against the Brute Polak stereotype as part of the larger struggle for social justice and equality.

This stereotype will only be defeated when Polonians and others adopt the strategies described in the three-part blog post entitled "The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision."